Grateful Dead fans in the UK who didn’t get tickets for the group’s farewell shows in July have reason to be dead grateful: the original jam band have announced that their final show, at Soldier Field in Chicago, will be broadcast via satellite to UK cinemas.
More than 250 cinemas across the UK will screen Fare Thee Well: Celebrating 50 Years of Grateful Dead on the evening of Monday 6 July, the day after the last ever Dead show. It will be a delayed screening – a live broadcast would be impractical, given the six-hour time difference between the UK and Chicago.
More than 500,000 people applied for tickets for the band’s Chicago shows on 3, 4 and 5 July. They will also play two hometown shows at the Levi’s Stadium, home of the San Fransciso 49ers.
The Dead had expressed frustration that so many tickets for their Chicago shows had been bought by touts and made their way to secondary ticketing sites at inflated prices. To enable more fans to see the shows, they had already decided to make the three Chicago gigs available to US viewers, and that all five farewell shows would be available via on online streaming platform.
The screenings in the UK (and the rest of the world, excluding the US) will be handled by CinemaLive, with tickets going on sale on 13 May, via cinemalive.com.
For the shows, the four surviving original members of the Dead – Mickey Hart, Phil Lesh, Bill Kreutzmann and Bob Weir – will be joined by Trey Anastasio of Phish, Jeff Chimenti, who has performed with Dead members’ post-Dead projects, and Bruce Hornsby, who began playing live with the band in 1988.
